“I made the case for a surge strategy. At this point that’s not being deployed, but I am not giving up,” Ms. Whitmer said last week, describing a Thursday evening call with the president. “Today it’s Michigan and the Midwest. Tomorrow it could be another section of our country.”
Ms. Whitmer has emphasized demand for Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose vaccine, which will be extremely limited until federal regulators approve production at a Baltimore manufacturing plant that recently contaminated up to 15 million doses in a factory mixup.
Andy Slavitt, a White House pandemic adviser, said on Monday that instead of playing “whack-a-mole” with vaccines, the federal government was working to help Michigan more efficiently administer the doses it has now and “rebalance” its supply.
“We know there are appointments available in various parts of the state, and so that means that we have excess vaccine in some parts of the state,” he said.
Mr. Slavitt said that the federal administration had also offered to send Michigan extra supplies of monoclonal antibody treatments and testing, and that there was a team from the C.D.C. in the state, in addition to 140 new vaccinators from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Elizabeth Hertel, the director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, said last week that she was optimistic that the continued rollout of vaccines and the governor’s new recommendations would help bring case numbers down. But if that did not happen, she said, more restrictions were possible.
In response to Dr. Walensky’s remarks, a spokesman for Ms. Whitmer said on Monday in a statement that while the governor appreciated the federal government’s assistance, “she will not stop fighting to get more vaccines for the people of Michigan.”
“As our nation’s top health experts have said, this is not a failure of policy, but rather a compliance, variant, and mobility issue, which is why it’s important for us to ramp up vaccinations as quickly as possible,” the spokesman, Bobby Leddy, said.